Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday February 28, 2014 @07:31PM
from the mobile-lan-party dept.

Lucas123 writes "As the sophistication of automotive electronics advances, from autonomous driving capabilities to three-dimensional cameras, the industry is in need of greater bandwidth to connect devices to a car's head unit. Enter Ethernet. Industry standards groups are working to make 100Mbps and 1Gbps Ethernet de facto standards within the industry. Currently, there are as many as nine proprietary auto networking specifications, including LIN, CAN/CAN-FD, MOST and FlexRay. FlexRay, for example, has a 10Mbps transmission rate. Making Ethernet the standard in the automotive industry could also open avenues for new apps. For example, imagine a driver getting turn-by-turn navigation while a front-seat passenger streams music from the Internet, and each back-seat passenger watches streaming videos on separate displays."
This might get us into trouble when the Cylons show up.

What's messed up is the article itself, especially in the belief that automakers will want to switch to this. Right now Cadillac and Lincoln cars have been using fibre in their cars for the 'drive-by-wire' system for years. As well as in parts of the HUD, and rear-display systems. Beleive you and me, they want to use this, because it's reallllly expensive it if gets toasted, and they have to replace part of the harness. This isn't really a job your layman can do, compared to say pulling and restringing an entire wiring harness inside the cab. That's something anyone with a bit of patience and weekend or two can do.

As a systems/network administrator I must say that If you are relying on general purpose wan connection for life or death services you are doing it wrong. Where I work we physically segment everything that is truly critical. The fire and alarm systems have multiple redundant connections including two that are 100% separate from our data network. The closest thing we have to a critical system running on a general purpose network is the use of SIP to provide connections from our phones to the PBX and that system has had a number of minor problems in the 7 years we have been using it. Ultimately if a phone call gets dropped in an office building the chances of someone dying because of it are truly minuscule. If on the other hand a drive by wire function fails you have a lot larger chance of death. I believe they will segment mission critical systems to a dedicate physical bus with redundant links in any proposed in car network. That way a entertainment system cannot interfere with the operation of say the headlights. My comment was made to expose the naivete of the original post and not to offer any truly insightful criticism.

What a horrible, horrible idea. Not the ethernet aspect, that makes sense, reinventing the wheel is usually a bad idea, and especially so when the competition has a multi-decade lead on eliminating bugs and malicious exploits and offers cheap, reliable off-the-shelf hardware. No, it's the idea of putting anything whatsoever user-accessible on the internal network I object to. If this data bus is carrying the information that tells my increasingly fly-by-wire care to apply the brakes or turn right to avoid oncomming semis then all it takes is one misbehaving flappy-bird clone spamming the network at the wrong moment to kill me, to say nothing of malicious attacks. There's absolutely no reason *anything* but internal systems communication should be on that network. Period. If you want an media network fine, but that can probably be provided far more cheaply and conveniently by including an airgapped $10 wireless hub with a 10' range that can only talk directly to things like the steering-wheel mounted media controls and the dashboard LCD/windshield HUD. And maybe a cellular modem. You're in a pretty decent approximation of a Faraday cage, so non-malicious outside interference should be minimal, and any communication with the mission-critical network should be heavily firewalled, at an absolute minimum. Not much reason to allow bi-directional communication at all - "spam" the wireless network with multicast up-to-the-second system and diagnostc data and you're good, at 0.01% of total bandwidth. No reason for anything not physically connected to be able to say a %$#@!* thing to the mission-critical components. If ever there was a non-hyperbolic use of the term "mission critical", maintaining control of a car is it.

* %$#@! - when no variation of "fuck" is strong enough. Bonus points if you can pronounce it. Q-Bert did, but then he had that hose-nose to work with.

And? The network between the brake pedal and the brake doesn't give a flying fsck about the state of the driver, just make abso-%$#@!-ing-lutely sure that nothing the user (or a malfunctioning/malicious app ) can interfere with the signal. For starters don't put anything user-accessible on the same network - insert a heavily firewalled router at least, and preferably an old-fashioned air-gap.